Published via F: 2013-08-27 06:03:44

Joined: August 16, 2013 14:26

With something it calls Datastores, Dropbox says it’s giving developers a way to make their apps truly cross-device and cross-platform. Datastores allow apps to write data about themselves into Dropbox from one device and read that data on another. At Dropbox’s offices, developers showed Wired a simple drawing app they built as a proof-of-concept. When Ruchi Sanghvi, Dropbox’s vice president of operations, drew a heart in the app on her iPad screen, the same heart appeared in near-realtime in a version of the app running on the web...

Drew Houston and company don’t want to stop at files. In large part because mobile devices have spawned a less file-centric user experience, much of the data we generate and access doesn’t have a separate life as a document. You don’t play Angry Birds on your phone and then save your game as a “.ang” file. If Dropbox’s gambit works, however, you will be able to pick up the game on your iPad where you left off playing on your Galaxy S4.

“Nobody talks of their content anymore as ‘my files and folders,’” Sanghvi says. Instead, she says, we talk in terms of the content itself: photos, videos, music, games. Taken together, she says Datastores and Drop-ins transform Dropbox into a platform that enables a “pervasive data layer” -- a way for all your digital stuff to follow you everywhere, regardless of device, operating system, or app.

“People are using these platforms to share and collaborate. They’re going to need tools to do that,” says Ferdowsi. “If Apple is going to ban tools that allow you to collaborate outside the ecosystem, I think that would end up hurting Apple.”

Dropbox is launching a new set of tools that could allow it to seep into nearly every corner of your digital life.

From Houston's description, much of leading a company is the sort of slog that Paul Graham praises: the difficult doing of things you're not quite comfortable with, on an endless basis.

What happens when your file-storage company becomes a full-on platform A whole lot of change for starters. How you manage the change determines if the...

From Houston's description, much of leading a company is the sort of slog that Paul Graham praises: the difficult doing of things you're not quite comfortable with, on an endless basis.

With the Datastore API, Dropbox isn’t competing against its traditional rivals -- other cloud-drive services such as SugarSync, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive -- so much as against operating systems themselves. It’s doing things in the same ballpark as capabilities that Google is building into Android and Apple (through iCloud) is building into iOS. Yet it’s doing those things as a third party, which means that there’s a limit to how deeply it can dig into the operating systems it supports.

It’s a daunting challenge -- so much so that it might feel hopelessly unrealistic if some brand-new startup were undertaking it. With Dropbox, whose existing features are already supported by more than 100,000 apps, it merely seems extremely ambitious. If the company can convince a critical mass of app developers to build in comprehensive Dropbox support -- among the apps and services doing demos at DBX are Yahoo Mail, 1Password and PicMonkey -- it might not matter all that much that it isn’t part of the operating system itself.

Andrew W. "Drew" Houston is an American internet entrepreneur who is best known for being the founder and CEO of Dropbox, an online backup and storage service. According to Forbes magazine, his net worth is $400 million US dollars.[1]

After graduating from MIT, Drew was endlessly frustrated by carrying USB drives and emailing himself files. In early 2007, he teamed up with fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi and the two began working on the project that would eventually become Dropbox.

Drew Houston is one of the few founders in the technology world who has been able to masterfully navigate the journey from MIT hacker to the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company. Houston and his team have been able to turn file-sharing company Dropbox into a platform used by more than 150 million people across the globe in just six years. Which is why we are incredibly excited to announce that Houston will be joining us for an on stage interview at Disrupt SF.

Houston founded file-hosting giant Dropbox with Arash Ferdowsi at Y Combinator in 2007, with Sequoia Capital joining as one of the company’s first investors. At last count, Dropbox was valued at $4 billion. While Dropbox has already grown dramatically over the past few years, it’s clear that Houston and Ferdowsi have larger ambitions, including possibly taking Dropbox public in the not-too-distant future.

Drew Houston is one of the few founders in the technology world who has been able to masterfully navigate the journey from being an MIT hacker to the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company. Houston and his team have been able to turn file sharing company Dropbox into a platform used by over 150 mil..